All lanes on the Mexico City-Puebla highway are now open after protesters ended a five-day blockade early Saturday.
Residents of the municipality of Santa Rita Tlahuapan, Puebla, commenced a blockade of the Mexico City-Puebla highway and the Arco Norte toll road last Tuesday.
They hoped to pressure on authorities to compensate them for land expropriated more than 60 years ago for the construction of the highway.
The protesters, among whom were ejidatarios or community land owners, cleared their blockades on Saturday morning after several hours of dialogue with state authorities.
Puebla Interior Minister Javier Aquino Limón told reporters on Saturday morning that the Mexico-Puebla highway and the Arco Norte road had been “completely reopened in both directions.”
Earlier last week, the protesters agreed to clear one lane in each direction after their blockades halted truckers and motorists for two full days and caused economic losses in excess of 10 billion pesos (US $524.3 million), according to business groups.
Aquino said that ejidatarios and their “committees and advisors” would meet with federal authorities on Monday to discuss their compensation claim for 41 hectares of land on the López Rayón ejido that the government expropriated for highway construction in 1958.
As of 2:30 p.m. CST, there was no news of the outcome of that meeting.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last week that the government couldn’t pay more than the amount established by an appraisal carried out by a federal authority.
“The appraisals are done, we have the money to pay the campesinos but the lawyers say, ‘We don’t agree with the appraisals.’ They want more,” he said last Thursday.
“[But] we, as public servants, can’t pay more than an appraisal establishes,” López Obrador said without revealing the valuation amount.
With reports from El Universal, Proceso and La Jornada
These blockades are so common in Mexico. It would be interesting to know the total annual economic losses to the Mexican economy because of them.
We may be inconvenienced but if the compensation was indeed sixty years overdue we can hardly blame people for demanding their rights. Doubtless this story has many nuances that rarely appear in news articles.